Elon Musk and a Boeing Rocket Are in a Race for Mars

Whoever wins, we’re all headed to space soon.

Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg said he will beat Elon Musk’s SpaceX to Mars, according to comments he recently made at an innovation conference in Chicago.

"I'm convinced that the first person to step foot on Mars will arrive there riding on a Boeing rocket,” Muilenburg said at the conference.

Boeing is working on a rocket for NASA, which claims it will ferry people to Mars by the 2030s. The Boeing project, known as the Space Launch System, is said to be the prime contractor platform for activating the most powerful equipment ever assembled to blast you, or someone not completely unlike you, into deep space and beyond.

Perhaps the most interesting (and exciting) part of Muilenberg’s plan is to have hyper-speed air travel for Earth, meaning, you and me could travel all over the globe in a matter of a few hours. So, do I want lunch in Paris and dinner in Culver City? Yes, please.

Boeing Chief Executive Officer Dennis Muilenburg sketched out a Jetsons-like future at a conference Tuesday, envisioning a commercial space-travel market with dozens of destinations orbiting the Earth and hypersonic aircraft shuttling travelers between continents in two hours or less. And Boeing intends to be a key player in the initial push to send humans to Mars, maybe even beating Musk to his long-time goal.

Last week Musk talked big about his detailed plan to colonize Mars in the next 10 years, which by my watch, is sooner than Boeing's projected journey. Some may say that Musk is known to wrongly estimate deadlines—and SpaceX suffered a big set back in early September when a Mars rocket prototype blew up. Still, Musk claims that with the overall success of recent rocket testing, he’ll get to Mars much sooner than the 2030s.

Either way, this is all happening. With all this hearty competition, someone will be on Mars very soon. And it sounds like many of the rest of us might even get the chance to see the world now, too.